Software Enthusiast - KOY

By: Adetayo Okusanya: The company you work for has just completed its people review cycle and one of the outcomes expected from this process is the promotion announcement. It is very typical in your organization for heads of departments to send an email to their entire team listing and congratulating individuals within the team who have been promoted to the next level by management. You are looking forward to the promotion announcement because you believe that your name will be on the forthcoming list. There is a widespread understanding within the company, based on historical trends, that on average, an employee will be promoted every three years. You have just completed your third year in your current job position. Finally the announcement day arrives. You are heading back from your lunch break and there is a buzz in the office. The promotion announcement is out. You walk briskly to your desk, your heartbeat racing faster from exertion, anticipation and suspense. You can al...

By : Adetayo Okusanya 3.You are not visible enough You get to work at seven in the morning and leave at seven at night. You do your best to get your job done and your work day is ruled by your job description. You are not inclined to seek responsibilities, or extend your influence, outside your team. You never volunteer to lead or support high visibility cross-group committees set up to tackle important business challenges. You believe in flying under the radar, blending into the environment and doing no harm to your team members and the organization. Your motto is "Don’t rock the boat!" and you refuse to engage in what you perceive as "office politics". Networking at work is a concept that is foreign to you, so you do not actively seek to meet and engage corporate executives or colleagues that work in other parts of the business. Here is the challenge. You have become an expert in making yourself forgettable. You spend fifty hours of your week doing work w...

By : Adetayo Okusanya 5. Your nickname is “Tornado Tom” You get the job done, no matter what. You have developed a reputation for setting aggressive deadlines and completing projects ahead of schedule. You are great at keeping emotions out of business issues and you drive yourself and others hard. The return on investment (ROI) on your projects is thrice that of your peers. Your ability to milk revenue from clients and slash project costs is the stuff that legends are made of. Indeed, you have become a legend in your organization. Here is the challenge. No one wants to work with you. You are a legend for all the wrong reasons. Your customers feel cheated, your vendors feel bullied, your team members feel assaulted and your manager is overwhelmed with complaints about your work style. You get the job done but you leave a trail of disgruntled and angry stakeholders in your wake. You are frequently reassigned to new accounts to appease clients who threaten to take their bus...

I had been battling with unraveling the mysteries of the design pattern at my place of work since my first day there. We had a lot of brain trusts and unfortunately, all the brain trusts had left or about to leave with the trusts by the time I joined, so, I did not have the luxury of interacting with them in order to understand the design principle and all the other undocumented features/consideration for the application. The architecture worked as along as one was in compliance with the work flow. Unfortunately, a lot of behind the scene stuff was shrouded in mystery and only a handful of people really understood what was going on. I was not content with following the factory workplace work flow - do it repeatedly a particular way and you'll get the same exact result as expected. I wanted to understand how the system really worked and not just the abstracted layer in form of a framework/template/work flow. The best bet, in my view, was to try and unravel the design principl...